


Time Doesn't Care If You Notice It Passing

by endlesschaos



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Gen, Sam Winchester Has Mental Health Issues, Worried Dean Winchester, not wincest even if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:26:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27535228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endlesschaos/pseuds/endlesschaos
Summary: So, Sam thinks about dying and he thinks about Dean and he thinks that’s enough. He thinks it has to be.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 3
Kudos: 65





	Time Doesn't Care If You Notice It Passing

He doesn’t remember when summer ended. He barely remembers when it started. Case-to-case; apocalypse-to-apocalypse. It’s all the same anyway. It all ends the same anyway.

He thinks maybe he should pay more attention, but Lucifer’s in his ear too loud for him to think about anything else. He wants to sleep, but he can’t walk into a room, rest his head on a pillow, curl up under covers that have all been touched by Lucifer.

(He’s yet to tell Dean he hears Lucifer again. He’s yet to say _Lucifer is out of the cage, everything I did, everything I dealt with, none of it matters because Cas said yes and now, we don’t know where Lucifer really is, but I can hear him behind me all the time_. He’s yet to tell Dean.)

He rubs his stomach, aching where Cas – Lucifer – reached in and tried to rip him apart, tried to explode his soul across the walls of the bunker. It’s been months. He thinks Castiel failed at getting Lucifer’s essence all the way out. He’s still there. There’s still a hand working its way around his soul, looking for the weakest part – he doesn’t think it should take long, Lucifer did a hell of a job with his soul those first one hundred years.

Dean hadn’t asked what had happened, how Sam had known Cas wasn’t Cas, too caught up in the passivity of his time in 1943, his inability to save so many people. Sam can’t blame him. He can’t imagine having to look any of them in the eyes, knowing those would be their last hours. He also can’t imagine what he’d say if Dean had asked. _Oh, you know, we were trying to get you back and I thought Cas needed more power, so I offered up my soul; I thought it’d work and suddenly Lucifer had his hand in my soul and I thought I was gonna die; I thought you’d come back to see me splattered on the walls; it’s okay though, that didn’t happen, everything worked out_.

(Nothing worked out.)

It’s too late now, anyway. It’s not relevant. They have the British Men of Letters to worry about. They have their mother to worry about. They still have Lucifer to worry about, but some things are more immediate. Besides, Sam’s mental state has always been terrible, him hearing the devil is old hat. He doesn’t need to tell Dean something else has been added to the list of things the Devil has done to him.

He just wishes he could sleep. It’s not as bad as when he first started hearing Lucifer; it’s not as bad as when he’d stay awake for days to flames licking at his skin and Lucifer’s laughter echoing around him. It’s not as bad.

Not as bad doesn’t mean not bad.

Sometimes he imagines what it’d be like to sit with Mary and tell her everything. Bare his soul to his mother like he’s supposed to be able to. Other times he calls himself an idiot for ever thinking about it. Mary is Dean’s mother and even still, Dean isn’t able to bare his soul. He gets Words With Friends. He gets texts and the occasional phone call. He doesn’t get late-night talks over cups of tea that help him heal from years of John Winchester.

Sam doesn’t get any of it.

Sam gets her phone number through Dean so he can send her texts that will always go unanswered (unless she needs Dean, unless Dean isn’t answering her texts). Sam gets looks of longing, looks that say, _I miss my boys, why did I walk into that nursery?_ Sam gets ignored.

Sam gets the devil.

He thinks maybe he deserves this. Thinks maybe he deserves being haunted by Lucifer, thinks maybe he deserves a mother who barely looks at him. He’s always been a freak. He’s always been something someone else might want to hunt. He remembers thinking the trials were meant to purify him. They never did, not because he didn’t finish them, but because they were never meant to, never could. He’s a vessel for the devil, he doesn’t get to come back from that, not even through a test set forward by God.

_You’re unclean. In the biblical sense._

He doesn’t think Billy was referring to the infection from the Darkness. He thinks she was referring to the infection that is his very soul. He thinks he’s been awake too long.

-

He wakes to Dean slapping the table in the library, telling him they need to get moving, they’ve got a case. He rubs his eyes and starts closing the books he fell asleep on. Dean drops a bag of some food that smells greasy and processed in front of him.

“Eat up. It’s a long way to Washington.” Dean’s smiling at him slightly, but there’s a look in his eyes that says he knows Sam hasn’t slept in his own room in at least a week.

“What’s in Washington?” He says, stacking the books and standing. He picks up the bag, but only to appease Dean. He already knows it’ll be in the trash before it gets anywhere near his stomach.

“Werewolves. Probably.”

-

They hunt werewolves in Washington, vampires in Montana, and chicken and mashed potatoes in South Dakota – _you boys have got to stop showing up on my doorstep covered in blood; the neighbors are gonna start calling the cops,_ Jody winks at them, ushering them into the house, only pausing for tight hugs that feel more motherly than anything he’s gotten from Mary.

By the time they make it back to Kansas, Sam’s tired enough to pass out in his bed without feeling his skin crawl. When he wakes six hours later, he calls it a win. He figures he’s allowed that much.

He doesn’t stay in his room longer than it takes him to get out of bed and out the door. First, ignore Lucifer mockingly telling him to stay in bed longer, promising he won’t even hog the covers too much. Second, coffee. He stumbles to the kitchen, rubbing sleep out of his eyes as he fills the pot with water, the filter with grounds. He finds his computer in the bag he left abandoned on the table shortly after they returned. When he opens it, he sees it’s barely six in the morning, but he knows there’s no way he can sleep longer.

He thinks maybe if he keeps going like this, he’ll either be back in a psych ward with broken ribs and lacerations or he’ll be fine. He’s not sure he cares which. He thinks that should be a red flag.

-

Some days he thinks about dying. At this point, Dean has Mary – in between hunts with Ketch and the time Mary takes to orient herself in the future, Dean has Mary. Lucifer is still out there, but the British Men of Letters seem capable and Cas and Crowley have teamed up as America’s Most Unlikely Duo on the hunt for the devil, so sometimes he thinks about dying.

It’s not that he’s particularly inclined or it’s something he’d intentionally put effort into, but sometimes he thinks about how easy it’d be to get just sloppy enough during a hunt to not make it out the other side. Maybe it’s honorable (it’s not and he knows it), maybe it’s how he’s supposed to go (the man who saved the world taken out by a level one ghost doesn’t sound right, but he knows that too). He just thinks it’s the only way for him to go without making it look like he’s actively giving up on everything. It’s the only way for him to get away from the Lucifer in his head and, if he’s lucky, the Lucifer wandering out in the world.

Other days he looks at Dean and thinks there’s no way he could do that to him. They’ve been through enough. Sam has put Dean through enough.

So, Sam thinks about dying and he thinks about Dean and he thinks that’s enough. He thinks it has to be.

-

Sam doesn’t remember when summer ended. He doesn’t remember when fall did either. He just looks down one day while they’re on a case in Colorado and sees his boots are covered in snow and his fingers are numb where they’re wrapped around his shotgun. He looks at Dean and sees his lips are tinged blue where they’re turned down in a scowl and his cheeks are lightly pink where the cold has bit in. He dressed for the cold, he knew it was snowing, he just didn’t realize it was two weeks from Christmas until they pass several evergreens and he thinks, _oh_ , wonders if they’ll celebrate, knows they probably won’t.

(They have a Nephilim to find.)

He hears Lucifer laughing slightly as they stalk through the woods, making jokes about Sam’s memory. _C’mon, Sam, really? You want to celebrate my dad’s weird human son after everything?_ Sam doesn’t want to admit it, but Satan has a point.

Sam had hoped when they sent Lucifer back to the cage, he’d stop hearing him in his head. He should’ve known not to be so naïve. He still hasn’t told Dean. He still doesn’t know how. It’s not like he’s seeing him, he just hears his voice sometimes. He’s more than used to ignoring things he’d rather not deal with.

(After expelling Lucifer from the president and sending him back to the cage, Sam felt more hopeful than he had in years. It wasn’t until he was sitting in that prison cell with only the devil in his head for company did he realize that no matter how many times Lucifer was put into the cage, Sam would never be able to escape him.)

Sometimes Sam thinks he’s always had a devil looking over his shoulder. Not just in the demons Lucifer and Azazel had following him throughout his life, but just in his soul. He can blame Azazel all he wants for infecting him with the demon blood, but he knows in his bones exactly what he was already destined for. He exists outside of Lucifer if only in that he exists in spite of him.

-

He doesn’t remember when fall ended so he shouldn’t be surprised when winter ends too. He thinks maybe he’ll notice the seasons changing when he’s able to stop and breathe long enough. He doesn’t think that time will come soon. He’s starting to think it never will.

(He remembers when it was really bad, when he first heard the devil after the cage. He remembers the difficulty of grasping reality. It didn’t make sense. It doesn’t now, but he’s got a better grasp. He remembers the Leviathan and how just waking up to see Dean in the motel bed next to him was unbelievable enough, let alone monsters that just won’t die, monsters that are only hurt with kitchen cleaner, monsters that not even God trusted with his own divine creation. He wonders if the only reason – beyond Dean – he believed he was out of the cage was that it was almost too bizarre to be fake.)

He’s loaded Dean and himself with back-to-back cases to the point where even Dean wants to slow down. He doesn’t know how, so he pretends to laugh when Dean complains.

“C’mon, there’s a ghost in Wichita. Basically our backyard. Let’s go.” He knows he’s running both of them into the ground, but it’s easier than standing still long enough for Lucifer to breathe down his neck.

It’s another two weeks before they find themselves back at the Bunker. There’d been a shifter in Sacramento, a rugaru in Raleigh, and an ultimately unhelpful lead on Kelly Kline in Kansas City. By the time they make it back, Dean forces them to stay there for at least a week. He’s just as bad at staying in one place as Sam is, so they’re both itching for another hunt before the week is even up, but Sam only sleeps about half the nights they’re there. He knows Dean can see it, the bags under his eyes, the pauses he takes after he stands, but neither of them mention it. He’s never been more grateful for good old fashioned Winchester denial.

He wants to say he sleeps best in motel rooms and he supposes he does, but his bar for restful nights is below sea level so he figures it doesn’t mean much. Lucifer may be back in the cage, but he’s gotten out twice in Sam’s lifetime, so he figures that doesn’t mean much either. They can do whatever they want, but Lucifer always finds a way.

-

He makes it three more weeks before Dean forces them back to the Bunker, two glasses of whiskey on the desk in the library for a Talk. As far as sibling soul-baring goes, they’re pretty weak. Dean tries to listen, tries to help. Sam doesn’t know where to start, doesn’t know what to say. _How permanent is Lucifer’s lockup? He’s already gotten out twice in the last ten years, what’s stopping him from doing it again?_ Sam doesn’t know how to ask these questions without sounding like a scared kid.

Instead, he says, “I don’t think I can handle another apocalypse,” and Dean looks at him like he’s just shattered the entire world. “If Lucifer gets out again, I don’t think I’ll make it out alive.”

“He won’t. He’s back in the Cage and no one is going near that thing ever again.” Dean’s good at making promises. He’s good at taking Sam’s fears and turning them into something worth scoffing at, turning them into something Sam can handle. But Sam can’t handle this.

“I just keep thinking that if we’d known about the Men of Letters the first time around, I wouldn’t have gone to the Cage at all.”

Dean’s good at anger. He’s good at placing blame and directing all his rage toward wherever he’s placed it. He’s good when he has direction.

“You’re probably right. The British Men of Letters probably could’ve helped us if they hadn’t been useless librarians.”

Sam downs the rest of his whiskey, looks Dean straight in the eyes, and says, “I just keep thinking that if we’d known, I wouldn’t be seeing Lucifer again.”

Dean’s good at fighting, at shooting, at taking charge of things he can control. Dean’s never been good when the issue is Sam’s head. He looks right back at Sam and doesn’t say a thing. Sam just pours himself another glass and leans back in his chair to drink.

-

Sam doesn’t remember when Spring ended, but it’s Summer and they’ve lost everything again.

Lucifer is back, Cas is gone, Mary is gone, even Crowley is gone. He’s got a kid to look after now, but if anything, that leads to Dean being gone too. He wonders how long he’ll have Jack before he’s gone, too.

He still thinks about dying. He thinks about dying more often, but with less intent. Dean doesn’t have Mary anymore and Jack has no one. He can’t die when he has people depending on him, but a lot of the time he wishes he could. He wishes for a lot of things.

Sometimes he forgets that Lucifer is in the other world because his hallucination has gotten really good at convincing him that he’s back and ready to manipulate Jack into turning into him. Sometimes he walks into the kitchen and sees Jack and Lucifer talking and he has to pause until the real Jack walks into the room asking him if he’s okay. Sometimes he thinks he sees the red emergency lights turn on at 3 in the morning warning them that Lucifer is in the Bunker ready to take Jack and kill Dean and he has to walk around the Bunker until his hands stop shaking and he can take full breaths again.

He wishes he could just sleep.

(He’ll never forget the bone-chilling fear he felt when he called Rowena and Lucifer picked up the phone, the tinny sound of Lucifer’s voice coming through the phone speaker less than a day after he found out he was still topside. He’d thought – hoped – for a second that his hallucination had risen to new heights, but as soon as he held out the phone for Dean and Mary to hear, he knew he wasn’t imagining it. He’ll never forget the mental image he got of Rowena when Lucifer described how he’d killed her. He’ll never forget the way he felt while talking on the phone with the actual devil. He’ll never forget it no matter how hard he tries.)

He and Dean haven’t talked about the fact that Sam still sees Lucifer since he told him months ago, but sometimes Dean will look at him like he’s trying to gauge whether Sam is sane enough to be hunting. He always leaves the room when he catches Dean doing it.

-

He and Dean leave Jack at the Bunker while they go to hunt werewolves in Presidio. Texas summers suck, but werewolves gotta eat and Winchesters gotta hunt.

The wolves are sloppy, but still good enough to hide. They’re staying in the mountains and feasting on campers. Big Bend is massive, and it gives plenty of places to hide and hunt. They spend the days hiking, looking for any cave, any cabin, any campground that looks fitting for a pack of werewolves. They’ve managed to narrow down their search to the Chisos Basin, a good 40-mile area to search through, but if John Winchester had taught them anything, it was how to be thorough and efficient.

They work their way through the less populated campgrounds before working their way off the designated trails. Werewolves love anonymity and cabins hidden in their own private areas are perfect for that.

By the time they find three cabins hidden away in their own notch in the mountains, the sun has started to set. The lights in all three cabins stay on and music starts drifting out of them. Sam and Dean sneak around the side of one of the cabins as two people walk out, holding beers and shouting something to the people inside. Neither of them is sure how many wolves there are, but Sam’s certain they’re extremely outnumbered. He looks to Dean who seems to have reached the same conclusion and they nod at each other before rounding the corner.

They are, unsurprisingly, immediately spotted. Dean raises his gun to shoot one of them before they can warn the wolves inside and Sam does the same with the other. They take them out easily, but the gunshots cause the others to come outside.

“Winchesters,” one wolf says, sounding wearier than anything, sounding more like he should’ve known they were coming. Sam wastes no time in shooting him, but five more wolves have walked out of the cabins. He looks over to Dean to see him aiming at one of the wolves without noticing another leaping at him. Sam shoots him before he can reach Dean, but it means he misses the wolf coming at him.

He’s knocked to the ground, gun flying out of his grasp before he realizes he’s been hit. There’s a wolf on top of him, hands wrapped around his throat and if he hadn’t already had the wind knocked out of him, he’d probably have a better chance. He grabs at the wolf’s hands uselessly, trying to get some air into his lungs, but his fingers are getting weaker and his vision has gone grey at the edges. He vaguely hears Lucifer laughing, mocking him, _oh, Sam, you beat me and all it takes is one wolf to take you out, how pathetic_. He’s about to give in when he hears a gunshot and the wolf collapses on top of him.

He manages to shove the wolf off and he rolls onto his stomach, coughing hard enough he thinks he might vomit. He still can’t breathe, can’t pull any air in. He feels hands on his shoulders, and he struggles against them, trying to get away.

“Hey, woah, Sammy. It’s just me.” He hears Dean’s voice filter in, and he tries to relax, tries to let Dean help. Dean hauls him off his stomach and onto his knees. “C’mon, man, deep breaths.”

He forces his muscles to loosen, forces himself to focus on breathing rather than the feeling of hands on his throat, the sound of Lucifer’s laugh. Dean’s hands don’t leave his back, holding him upright while he finally manages to breathe. He looks up and sees Dean has a nasty cut on his forehead, blood sliding down his temple and cheekbone.

“You back with me?” Sam nods, coughing slightly. “Okay, let’s head out.”

“Wait, let me look at your head.” Dean gives him a weird look but stays still. Sam’s fingers prod the area around the wound. Luckily, it doesn’t look like it’ll need stitches, but he’s willing to bet Dean’s got a major headache coming his way. He’ll clean it up back at the motel. “Okay, let’s go.”

They’re a good hour from their motel and a good half-hour walk from the Impala so Sam figures they got lucky. Sam will have some pretty stark bruising on his neck and Dean will probably stay away from bright lights for the next day or two, but they can both walk on their own.

On the car ride back, he thinks about how close to death he was. He thinks about how close to death he always is. They’re always on the verge of pushing it too far, taking one too many hunts. He wonders what Dean would’ve done if he’d been just a minute later. He wonders what Jack would’ve done if Dean had walked back into the Bunker alone. It’s not that he doesn’t care how much his death would hurt them, he just doesn’t know if he can keep living like this.

Some days Sam thinks about dying and some days he almost dies. Sometimes he thinks about if Dean will be too late to pull the monster off him. Sometimes he thinks he wouldn’t mind. He knows it would hurt Dean and it would hurt Jack and with everything that’s happened, he can’t do that to either of them.

So, Sam thinks about dying and he thinks about Dean and he thinks about Jack and he thinks that’s enough. He thinks it has to be.

-

He doesn’t remember when summer ended. He barely remembers when it started. Case-to-case; apocalypse-to-apocalypse. It’s all the same anyway. It all ends the same anyway.

(Someone always dies.)

(He can only hope he’s next.)


End file.
